For me, KeepassX compiled with Qt 4 or 5 does the job. I store its encrypted wallets on the cloud. Linux, Android, Windows, and Mac all work with it. What's LastPass got that I should be interested in?

I wish this effort all the best, but I think we're going to find that life without stable ecosystems or a magnetosphere is not going to be easy. We take much for granted here on Earth, and though the technology may allow us to land some people there, I predict that living healthy lives with a stable local food supply is going to take a lot more than the rocket scientists are counting on. Biochemistry and ecology have vastly more complex open systems to deal with, but that's what we come from.

Better send automated manufacturing there and let the robots get some things right first before the colonists land.

There's no reason we can't have a transparent, well-monitored paper ballot. With all the issues that have surfaced, I think that's our best option. The average poll-worker does not have the technical expertise to maintain security on a computerized system, and the real experts have demonstrated so many flaws in widely-used voting machines that they should be scuttled.

Though I've tried other desktops, KDE 5 is what I keep coming back to. Sometimes Unity and Gnome feel more streamlined, but KDE's configurability is just too awesome. I can define keyboard shortcuts that apply across its applications. I can define not online virtual desktop screens but activities which affect the power usage profile. I can tailor window behavior, laptop lid, and network profiles with comfort. It's my working and browsing environment on a day-to-day basis and has been for years. I use it on top of Fedora and love it - other OS's are only for specialty uses like gaming and music/audio.

Somehow, the idea that it's not fashionable enough for a clickbait article seems just silly.

This is the sort of thing that prompted Open Source Ecology's open-source hardware - the vital machines of civilization, built from collaboratively updated open source blueprints, made to a modular design from off-the-shelf parts. Know FreeCAD? Welding? You can make a tractor. I've seen one of the initial prototypes, and it was doing the job.

In my estimation, this is one of the most important open source projects of all time. This stuff is maintainable and built without planned obsolescence. We need that kind of freedom at the base of civilization.

Why would someone claim to have hacked Clinton's email when they hadn't, to the point where they get extradited and caught up in a legal case? It seems like now is a very strange time for backtracking.

Not only inflation, but without curbs on predatory lending, payday loan shops are going to clean this out of disadvantaged people really fast.

I'm in favor of universal basic services - can we agree that nobody should starve when robots do most of the work better than we do? Then let there be staple food and a shelter, however humble. Utah has found out that this is way cheaper than criminalizing poverty and homelessness and jamming up the court system with people who couldn't find a decent place to sleep.

We still have six homes standing empty for every homeless person in the USA, because banks made a mess of the market and even the record of ownership. The banks get to borrow money from the US government at lower interest rates than they get loaning it to the government. They get a protected cartel in the form of a Federal Reserve that moves trillions. We can afford basic services, and in fact, we can't afford to keep our population scrambling in survival mode instead of getting educated enough to do something actually meaningful. Entrepreneurship shouldn't be just for yuppie kids who can bum their starting funds off of mom and dad.

This has all the same flaws as creationism or rapture theory in the church. Hand-waving the complexity of the world we're in and putting it up to a hypothetical universe the simulation is running in simply kicks the can down the road. There's no evidence for it, just an argument from incredulity at the nature of the world we actually interact with. A universe with a civilization advanced enough to simulate ours doesn't make the questions go away, or simplify them one bit.

Further, squandering the energy reserves of a civilization to simulate another civilization and universe to this level doesn't seem something a civilization could get away with doing for millenia. Ours sure isn't.

Same old myths, just somebody has a computer on their desk instead of a bronze age text. Humans don't change much.

It'd better be land nobody particularly rich wants. They don't even have to use eminent domain. A bought official can raise property taxes, find a way to make a neighbor complain about your "eyesore" house, or harass you about all that self-sufficiency you've got instead of a well-manicured lawn. Better not get in the way of a pipeline either! All of these are ways property owners have lost their land.

People keep trying to retreat into their own domicile, and that only works temporarily for some of them. The system is designed to keep you to the grind for almost nothing so major shareholders can profit and governments collect more taxes from people without clout. Running off to your own small patch of "I've got mine" does nothing to solve an unjust social order, IMHO.

I really do like your critique - it addresses a part of the elephant I wasn't specifically talking about in excellent detail. With a little analysis I think we're talking about the same thing.

Pre-existing concentration of wealth provides the clout to bargain - such that any little concession for the public's basic living needs like decent building codes, food safety, access to health care, so on can only happen in tandem with the government effectively locking in well-connected private industries into monopoly positions. This is what happened with the purportedly progressive ACA health care, what's happened to building codes, and what's happening to food production. Government force and outrageous bureaucratic and financial hurdles are being used to cement large corporation's power and keep people from doing what they need to do, and that's the reality of the "free" market. It couldn't happen if we were truly equally enfranchised and free.

If you catch a thief with stolen goods and let them keep their war-chest and bribe the courts with it from then on, and call any future attempt to right that wrong "redistributing wealth" with a nasty connotation, you have what's happened in the USA.

And huge number of affidavit ballots cast in New York have simply not been counted.

Across the country, voters that have long been registered Democrat have discovered their registration details tampered to make their participation in closed primaries impossible. The door to this was left open when 191 million voter records were leaked, making re-registration with edited details trivial. The earlier scandal over the DNC voter records being open allow for specific targeting of those not supporting Clinton which is the demographic reporting issues.

Adam Smith was never writing about what's called the "free market". He envisioned small-scale peer-to-peer reputation-driven interaction, not what we have.

We need to stop calling Wall Street crony-ism a free market. It's a rigged market working for a few. How many of you out there have chance to not be haggled down to the very minimum that can be paid? How many people are routinely being awarded bonuses, and are they really contributing that level of worth to society? There you have it - resources divided not by merit, but by political and economic clout.

In other words, we have an unjust power differential, the same problem with the state-collectivized system that we refer to as socialism, but there are very different types of socialism out there and they don't all work like the totalitarian state-collective system of Stalin and Mao. Kerala's example of "land to the tiller" redistributes private ownership to guarantee ownership of the minimum tools and resources necessary to be self-sufficient. European social democracy may have problems, but many of those countries do have a stronger middle class and take for granted people in the USA only wish for. Again, the term is glossing over a lot and leaving key pieces out of the USA's public discourse, quite to the advantage of the ownership class who would keep anything demonized that would loosen their chokehold on the nation's wealth.

The key differences in any society, if you were to ask me, are the levels of equality in distribution, and representation in policy, and of accountability - meaning that corrupt officials and representatives who listen to lobbyists instead of constituents would get kicked out of office. Equality, representation, accountability - not capitalism versus socialism.

In those terms, people don't get hung up over whether government is big or small but whether it's in the public interest. Oligarchy in the form of Wall Street or a Communist party gets identified as oligarchy whatever the label. We remember that the real deal is that the people are in charge and can stop their government from going out of control.